Modeling and simulation under the standard architectures: how will DOD organizations make it happen?

During the past decade, the military Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community has seen the formation of the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) in the Department of Defense (DoD). Subsequently, many other offices have been formed within the Services to be Service focal points for M&S and to coordinate Service domains. Out of this has arisen the awareness of the need and benefits of a standard high level M&S architecture. Despite the current seemingly disparate and large number of architectures, the M&S environment within the DoD will settle down to a small set of modeling systems that will interoperate. However, does this mean that modeling will be mindless; will interoperability be automatic; will all answers be available to everyone? No, organizations will need to come together and plan their experiments within the chosen M&S architecture (i.e., they will need to federate). Wright Laboratory and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) have worked simulation technology extensively over; the years and most recently with the DMSO High-Level Architecture (HLA) and the Joint Modeling and Simulation System (JMASS). This paper will discuss the issues associated with organizations coming together to build a significant simulation suite, provide an approach to this activity, and share results of two federating efforts.